Friday, May 14, 2010

Rare is the instance when a major university faculty or staff members is able to make transforming philanthropic gifts to the institution where they are employed, but such is the case with this story in Los Angeles.

A world-renowned expert in organ transplantation, Paul I. Terasaki will fund a new life sciences building and an endowed chair in surgery.

Retired UCLA professor Paul I. Terasaki, who spent three years in a World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans and later became a world-renowned expert in organ transplantation, has pledged $50 million to the Westwood campus. The gift will fund a new life sciences building and an endowed chair in surgery.

Terasaki, who is 80 and lives in Brentwood, said in an interview Wednesday that he owes much of his academic and business success to UCLA and wants to repay the school.

"All of it had its origins in UCLA," he said as he prepared to fly to Japan to deliver a lecture on bone marrow transplants.

His donation, to be formally announced Thursday, is among a handful of the largest single gifts in UCLA's history, campus officials said. The largest was $200 million from entertainment industry mogul David Geffen to UCLA's medical school in 2002.